by Nick Jordan

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Getting (Pastoring) Things Done

I go to counseling about once a month, sometimes a bit more, and one of the things that we repeatedly talk about is my productivity or the lack thereof. That’s because it tends to determine my moods to a great extent. I hear the question,“How are you?” and my answer is not reflective of the last month, sometimes not even of the last week, but of the workweek. Am I behind? Am I ahead? Am I on target? How much will I have to work on Saturday?

There’s a ton of guilt wrapped up in there too. Levels of guilt: I should do better; I’m letting the church down; I’m letting God down (yikes!). And most practically, every minute I waste in a week feels like a minute robbed from my family and my time with them. All those levels of guilt are not the helpful kind, the kind that motivates you to change a behavior and work to repair damage. They’re the kind of guilt that ties you up and paralyzes you from making changes.

Previously I would have named this as a lack of administrative gifts/interest, a matter of personality type. Lots of pastors place administrative tasks at the bottom of the priority list. For many of us it would be more accurate to say that administrative tasks fall to the bottom because they weren’t actually placed anywhere. Sometimes we conceive of them not as a type of ministry but as a distraction from the real ministry.

I’ve always known this outlook wasn’t an option for faithful ministry. Answering emails and following through on projects are often the form that ministry work takes, and the administrative tasks related more to record-keeping are not the business-ification of the church but a valuable piece of reflection on the past and present in order to make changes in future action. The United Methodist Church collects tons of info every week, but it varies greatly if or how any of the data is used. But a pastor can use it as much as she wants.

The main non-guilt consideration for me, however, is that when I am not on top of the use of my time and my administrative tasks (and time management is itself an administrative task), I only seem to have time and energy for leading the church from week to week. Every leadership book and blog talks about the need for me to have a vision or future or discerned sense of calling for the future ministry of the congregation, but that’s never going to happen if I am already at capacity with one week’s tasks, if a single funeral (a not uncommon occurrence) can capsize my week.

Without good time management, there is no possibility of vision, let alone also establishing a margin around that. And a margin is essential too. Margin is extra time, not to be confused with unnecessary time. It’s necessary for healthy and sustainable ministry, necessary for a healthy and sustainable career in ministry.

Below is what many of my weeks have looked like: the rectangle is my regular work hours; the green is the stuff that should be able to fit in those hours, but doesn’t always; and the scribbles are the extra claims on my time, which often add to those hours:

Below is a better work week. The outer box is still the whole intended work week; there’s now an inner box to indicate less time given to the same essential, scheduled tasks; the green is still the stuff that has to get done (and, yes, it’s still sometimes escaping the planned hours); and the scribbles are those unplanned claims on my time. But we also notice that the box in the middle now has a margin, and all that gold on the end (the color of the Kingdom) is time for vision. The scribbles still push past the intended boundaries, but far less often.

The challenge is now to actually find the tools to get from Diagram A to Diagram B. That’s this post.